Set up a way for the virtual machine to read the windows disk or windows to have read/write access to the virtual machine's disk. My goal is to have a place where both Ubuntu and Windows can read and write.

What software is good for this task? Are their free programs that can run virtual machines?

Also if my machine is running Windows 7 64-bit, can I install Ubuntu 32-bit? Or am I forced to use Ubuntu 64-bit? Or does it not matter?

1 Answer
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There is a variety of virtualization software out there, but you may want to try VirtualBox.

When you create your virtual machine, you can specify the type of processor you have. Thus, you can select whether your virtual machine will have a 32-bit processor or a 64-bit processor. In other words, you can freely install Ubuntu 32-bit on your virtual machine, even though the host OS (Windows 7) is 64-bit.